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Embark on 'Mighty Quest for Epic Loot,' Ubisoft Montreal's first free-to-play game

Ubisoft Montreal certainly has its hands full with projects like Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 3, but that hasn't stopped the studio from making its first foray into the free-to-play space. The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is an asynchronous dungeon crawler designed for "middle-range gaming PCs," Ubisoft product manager Matthew Zagurak told Joystiq during an unveiling event in San Francisco last week.

The premise of The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is pretty simple: Players construct their own castle from a pool of available tiles. They build hallways and rooms, and then fill them with monsters who try to kill invading adventurers, who can be random players or friends made through the in-game social network or pulled from Facebook.

On the other side, you can assault castles with your adventurer, whom you can customize with equipment and abilities that you unlock as you earn experience points. You do that by killing monsters and ransacking other castles of their glittering spoils.

Each castle trip culminates in a final boss encounter, the last stop before wayward adventurers discover the riches awaiting them in the treasure room (assuming they get that far to begin with). The kind of enemy units and bosses you can drop into your castle is determined by your level – the more you play and progress, the more things you can unlock for your castle and your own warrior. Through an in-game social network, users can vote on published castles and compare their hero's progress against friends and others.

The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot doesn't have a launch date, though Ubisoft says a closed alpha test phase is planned to start next month.